How to Increase Windows Boot Time and Boot Performance.

Boot performance is something that is very important for end-users (customers). You don’t want to wait 3 minutes for your system to boot and be ready for your orders.You want it done as fast as possible.

It’s important to know what Windows does when it boots, only then you will be able to know how to increase the system boot performance, so read Learning: How does Windows 8 boot first! Then you are ready to start this How to Increase Windows Boot Time and Boot Performance tutorial.

Learning Path Information

Knowledge Requirements

1% is the lowest knowledge requirement, in fact this should everyone have if they are able to power on a computer (you need to press the power button…) 100% is expert level.

System Services and Processes

65%

Command Line

25%

Administrator Tools

50%

Warning

WARNING: The tools used in this post can disable system services and processes. Be aware that you need to be familiar with vital Windows services and processes before disabling, removing or modifying any of them. This could result in system damage that might not be recoverable. Please read our Terms and Conditions which states that WindowsInstructed or the Author cannot be held liable

What do I need to analyse my Boot Performance?

In order to execute all steps in this learning module you need the tool XPerf from the Windows performance Toolkit available in the Windows SDK for Windows 8.1. You can download that here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/bg162891.aspx Be sure you only install Windows Performance Toolkit, the other tools are not required.

Windows SDK: Perfomance Toolkit

Starting the Application

Once installed, you need to start recording a boot, you can do this with the tool that was installed called xbootmgr.exe be aware that this tool has no UI and it needs to be enabled by the command prompt.

DO NOTHING, XBootMgr will trace everything and show the following message when it’s done:

Xperf

This Window will close after a few seconds to minutes, wait for this process to complete. When it’s done continue executing these steps;

Open Start

Search for Windows Performance Analyzer and open the application

Click on File and Open…

Open the most recent .etl file you can find.

Analyzing the ETL file

You’ve now successfully recorded and opened your boot trace. The first time you see the Windows Performance Analyser the information might be a bit overwhelming, its normal! Double-click the first box named System Activity Processes by Lifetime and you should see a screen familiar to this one.

Performance Analyser: Processes

See the image above, the most important information, and the information we will work with is marked with red lines.

Proces This tells you which process it’s about, this will be useful information later as we then know what to disable to improve boot time

Duration As the name tells you, it’s how long it took for the proces to finish (in seconds)

Start Time & End Time This tells you how many seconds after boot the proces it started and how many seconds after boot it finished.

The first thing I always do is sort the information on the Duration column from high to low. This immediately tells you which processes are using the most resources on start-up and which we can disable to improve boot time [alert-warning]REMINDER: Be very careful on the next steps, as disabling crucial system services and processes can make your system unusable.[/alert-warning]

Windows Performance Analyser: Demo List

As you can see you will see a lot of processes originating from the WINDOWS folder. NEVER disable any of these without checking if this is a legit Windows process. These processes are crucial to your system. The first process in the demo list that is safe to disable such as nvxdsync.exe (1168) however upon a closer view you will see it might be important (“C:Program FilesNVIDIA CorporationDisplaynvxdsync.exe”). The best thing you could do is to search what this process does and if important leave it alone. I recommend using this website to check processes: File.info (http://www.file.info/windows/nvxdsync_exe.html) The next process we actually could disable is MSI_LiveUpdate_Service.exe (1960) and as an example we are going to do that. Since it took 180 seconds to boot it’s a quite heavy program.

2014, 2015 & 2016 Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Windows
Yuri specializes in troubleshooting (crash analysis and devices), system resource utilisation and system performance. He is also very interested in Customer Security. Yuri can be found as Windows Community Moderator and Wiki Author on Microsoft Answers and is active on different communities all across the web.

WindowsInstructed has been founded as a Windows solutions website for the most common Windows issues that users are experiencing while using their system. We index many online communities and look for a pattern of problems. When we find a pattern we will ask one of our experts in that expertise to write a Troubleshooting guide for the problem.

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